PAT:
Welcome to this episode of Like a Glove, the startup podcast about product-market fit. I’m your host, Pat East, and we’re recording here in the podcast studio from The Mill in Bloomington, Indiana, in the middle of 19,000 square feet of coworking and incubator space. Our mission is to launch and accelerate high-potential companies, and our vision is to become the center of coworking and entrepreneurship in Indiana. Today’s guest is Connor Hitchcock, the founder and CEO of Homefield Apparel. Thanks, Connor, for being here.
CONNOR:
Yeah, thanks for having me, Pat.
PAT:
Yeah, appreciate it. So tell us, what does Homefield Apparel do?
CONNOR:
Yeah. At Homefield, we are a direct-to-consumer collegiate apparel brand that emphasizes the more premium side of apparel. So it’s not going to be a classic collegiate t-shirt that you get thrown out to you when you’re a freshman on campus, then it becomes a gym shirt quickly. It’s high-end in terms of the quality of the fabrics, the designs. A lot of them, we don’t say vintage all the time, but a lot of them are vintage. They’re incredibly comfortable and really go after different niches in a school to understand the school’s history, what’s meaningful to a school. And then the way that we reach people is primarily through our D2C website.
PAT:
You sell a lot of t-shirts, you sell a lot of hoodies, right? And you have a lot of thoughtful designs, like you go into all of the history and the archives and find out really cool old mascots or designs that might still be relevant to today, or that folks might find interesting. And they’re all really nice soft t-shirts. That’s the main thing I like about Homefield, is that they’re not the shirts that become gym t-shirts. Right? These are nice, soft t-shirts, they’re not your Hanes that shrink as soon as you wash them. Right?
CONNOR:
Correct. Correct.
PAT:
So tell us what your definition of product-market fit is.
CONNOR:
Yeah, I would say product-market fit is getting the right products to the right people at the right time and the right place. I think it’s one of those things where, when I see a brand or a product or service, I think, oh, duh, why didn’t I think of that? That’s a short summation of it. But really it’s ensuring that you are serving the right people with the right thing. And with us, with Homefield, it’s not just, oh, “Everybody needs premium collegiate apparel,” because that could be easy. But it’s, “What fan bases are where?” So some people, some fan bases are really online in terms of what we see a lot, communities that are on Twitter. So it’s getting them the products and interacting with them in the right space and time. And not just that we make things that they would like, but we have to understand those other dimensions, too.
PAT:
So it’s the right product to the right people at the right time—
CONNOR:
And place.
PAT:
In the right place. Right. Because some of these folks may not be online, they may have rabid fan bases, but they’re not online. But you need them to be online, because you’re a direct to consumer, a D2C online brand.
CONNOR:
Right. And time is also really important with that, too. We’re not going to launch a football school during March Madness.
PAT:
Sure.
CONNOR:
Right? Right now we’re doing extremely well with the Dayton Flyers because they are having a miracle season in basketball. They’re the number-three team in the country. They have the presumptive national Player of the Year in Obi Toppin. And so there’s a lot of excitement. And so we release, part of product-market fit for us is releasing new Dayton designs in the middle of this miracle stretch. And doing a popup at UD arena for their last home game for senior night. So the time element is also important. I think it’s not looked at as much, but that really, as we began to think about product-market fit in a lot of different ways over last summer, it affected how we launched schools or when we launched schools.
Because we were really thinking of product and people, and the elements of time and place were not as emphasized. And that was evident because we would sit there and think, man, I’ve been talking–the amount of alumni association interviews we do with people, or just fans, would be like, “Yeah, I love your product, I love your product, love your product.” And I’d be like, well, why isn’t it selling in this fan base as much, if everybody tells me, “Wow, that’s a great idea”? And so maybe they’re just being nice to me, but also I think we were missing on some components.
PAT:
And so let’s talk a little bit about timing, specifically with maybe using a University of Dayton as a case study. So with Dayton, the Bloomington connection there is Archie Miller.
CONNOR:
Correct.
PAT:
He used to be the coach at Dayton, and now he’s the coach at IU. And even after he left Dayton, the program continued to go well and even got better. And so, how do you find those programs that are diamonds in the rough, that have a really high potential where you can get those licenses, and maybe get those licenses easier than you would for a really established college or university? How do you find those diamonds in the rough now so that they will be big later?
CONNOR:
I think finding diamonds in the rough, in this industry, involves being a fanatic sports fan. Which for me is not a hard thing to do. But it’s also, I mean, it’s just a willingness to go deeper. So there are some schools that . . . I’m trying to think of an example right now, that they’re always pretty . . . there’s schools that can do well in sports, but there may not be the online fan base. Right? So you have to see—with us and college football, it was going, there’s a guy, Bill Conley, he has a statistic called S&P+. Traditionally in college football, the top 25 doesn’t . . . It shakes out kind of well, but a lot of the talking heads you see on ESPN don’t really go in-depth, and they’re not going to find them. They’re called Mid-Majors in basketball, but in football they’re called a group of five teams that nobody talks about, so there’s not much attention.
So it’s going and finding in football the S&P+ statistics to see who’s really going to be good. That informed our decision of what teams are now eligible for us to add in the fall for football. And then we took that group and said, “Okay, I’m going to go on Twitter, and I’m going to see if there’s discussion around these teams.” Even if somebody has 1,500 followers, it could be 1,500 followers that are extremely devoted to Utah State Aggies football. And that informed our decision to go after Utah State.
In basketball, it’s—I have a little bit more knowledge being a Hoosier at heart, raised here, went to Indiana. But it’s still looking at the Ken Pom, it’s a similar idea. There’s a high potential for success with Dayton, we knew that already because they had Obi Toppin returning, who should have probably gone to the NBA last year. And then there’s a rabid fan base online for the Dayton Flyers. So the marriage of those two is what made us find that diamond in the rough. It helps also that they have a great unique logo with the Flyers and logo history and whatnot.
PAT:
And so it’s a little bit of just being a fanatic and understanding, here’s where maybe we should look. But it’s a little bit of, hey, we need to look at some actual statistics that may indicate who the bigger schools are going to be.
CONNOR:
Right. Exactly.
PAT:
And so, would one of those statistics maybe be strength of recruiting class? So if you have a good enough recruiting class two years in a row, let’s say, because most schools are only going to be . . . Your players are going to be there four years or less. So if you get a good recruiting class two years in a row, that’s going to be a majority of your players. Is that a good indicator, or no, for reasons maybe I’m not aware of?
CONNOR:
It’s definitely a good indicator. I mean, it’s why we made one of our decisions to really emphasize the Memphis Tigers this upcoming, or this past fall, I should say. Football is already doing well, which is a nice thing to lean into, but basketball is the number-one recruiting class in the country. So there’s a lot of excitement. Right? And you can jump on that bandwagon. So it certainly is one of the factors we look at.
PAT:
Very cool. So let’s talk about, well, your parent company is Homefield Apparel, but let’s talk a little bit about the precursor to that, Hoosier Proud. And so what was it, and what did you learn from there that informed how you’re building Homefield?
CONNOR:
Hoosier Proud was a brand—it wasn’t even really a brand when I started—but it was a brand that I started when I was a student in Bloomington, back in 2014. I went and, my now wife, back then my girlfriend, I had seen her cousin started an idea in Michigan, where he had just had some stickers of the Great Lakes made up and he ended up selling just an insane amount of these stickers. If you drive in Michigan you will see it within five minutes. I mean, everyone has them.
PAT:
It’s the—
CONNOR:
The Great Lakes Proud. Yeah.
PAT:
Great Lakes Proud.
CONNOR:
And so I talked to him and I said, “Hey, I think we could do something similar for Indiana with stickers.” And I had designs of my own, hadn’t seen really too many going on, at least in Bloomington, when I’m walking around in stores. So we just had some stickers sketched up, had them printed, walked around Bloomington. Literally, just—I can remember just, I was on the square this morning with my coffee—I remember the stores that I went and knocked on and got rejected most of the time. So a few stores did pick those stickers up. And so I’m a student at IU at the time, at the Kelley School, applying a lot of the same marketing things, built out a Shopify site to go with it. Some of these stores, including the state museum in Indiana, requested some shirts. And so, I didn’t know how to screen print, sent some designs that I had off to a screen printer that I had made a connection with. They printed three designs for us, we sold them in stores, sold them on our website. It was going well. I’m still a student, we’re doing some popup events selling at different festivals, what have you.
The big turning point for me was the Pinstripe Bowl, and I believe it was 2015, Indiana versus Duke. When Indiana, who traditionally does not make bowl games, lined up for a field goal in overtime, down three. Kicked the field goal, it appeared it was good. It was called no good, refs ran off the field. And everything with Indiana football has always been a little tongue in cheek, but I love Indiana football, ironically and unironically. And so we made a shirt that said the kick was good! It didn’t require any licensing. It wasn’t a great design or anything. But compared to anything else we’d ever done, it took off.
And so that whetted our appetite, maybe, to see, maybe there is something here where we could get licensing and it could do well. So that was a precursor back in 2015, didn’t launch Homefield until 2018. And I was able to test after “the kick was good,” I was able to get licensed for Indiana, Purdue, a few other schools in Indiana, since it was Hoosier Proud. Now I’m working full-time at a company in Greenwood, Indiana. And yeah, that’s where it all started. Once I saw the success of “the kick was good,” and a few other IU athletics tangentially related shirts that didn’t need licensing, and then went and got licensing. And once the licensing went really well for Hoosier Proud, I realized I could do this full time outside of the scope of just Indiana.
PAT:
And so you really took some of the things you learned at Hoosier Proud, like, hey, you’re quite literally teaching yourself how to do screen printing. You’ve got a little bit of a insight into the market that, hey, they really like these kitschy, Indiana-focus shirts, especially Indiana University. And so you got some licenses from Indiana schools and said, hey, I could probably make a go of this. You were at an e-commerce company in Greenwood and were learning about customer acquisition there. And you brought all those tools together and said, all right, let me do this for myself on a more national basis.
CONNOR:
Right. Right. Yeah, I was learning a lot at my old job at One Click as an eyewear retailer, direct-to-consumer retailer in Greenwood, like you mentioned that. They did and they still do a lot of really innovative things within their digital marketing. And they let me learn a lot and do a lot there. So I felt confident enough that I had the skill set to take this national. Where, Hoosier Proud, I mean, it was nice money while I was in college, but I mean, it wasn’t—
PAT:
It was beer money.
CONNOR:
Right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So those skills, as I honed those and understood marketing better, really helped me gain the confidence to go and do this full time.
PAT:
And so there were definitely some things that Hoosier Proud, that allowed you to be able to build and start Homefield. Were there any particular insights that you got at Hoosier Proud that you’re glad you got those insights because they really affected how you do things at Homefield?
CONNOR:
Yeah. One of the biggest things I think I learned from Hoosier Proud was being in tune with the moment, and how important that is to sports. For one, “the kick was good,” or when Archie Miller was hired, we had, I forget exactly what shirt, but it was “Marchie Madness” or something like that. It was really corny and kitschy.
PAT:
I think I bought that one.
CONNOR:
Yeah. But beyond that, tapping into a community, I think, we were really fortunate early on, there was a strong online community for Indiana University for basketball, in particular, and football. The guys over at Crimson Quarry, Jerod from Assembly Call, which is an IU podcast, a lot of these places, I myself was already a part of the community, so it was easier to enter in as a brand. But really learning how everything . . . It’s what we do now with Homefield, a lot is you enter a community, you become a part of the conversation in the community. But yeah, you have to earn your way in. You don’t just there be like, “Hi, fellow kids.” Like that meme on Twitter, the guy with the skateboard over his back, right? Yeah. It taught me a lot about the importance of a community around something. And not just, I’m going to throw something out there, just because it’s intrinsically cool, it’s going to sell. That never rarely works.
PAT:
There’s a built-in community for you that you’re trying to tap into, but you understand that community because you’re a part of it.
CONNOR:
Right. Exactly.
PAT:
Gotcha. And so originally when you started Homefield, and full disclosure, I’m a two-time investor, I think, in Homefield now. So I know Connor really well. You were targeting apparel for Div 2 and Div 3 schools, who are historically underserved. So I went to a really small school in Crawfordsville, Indiana, one of three all-male schools left in the nation. The only place you can buy Wabash College stuff is at the Wabash College bookstore.
CONNOR:
Right.
PAT:
They know it. And so there’s not a ton of designs, and the prices are pretty high. Right? And so you’re trying to service these fan bases. You added IU because it was proximal, right? So it’s in Indiana, you’re an alum, there’s a big fan base, their licensing department is easy to work with.
CONNOR:
Right.
PAT:
And so now you’re intentionally going after larger schools. And so why the pivot from Div 2 and 3 schools where you started this company for an underserved market, to these larger schools who don’t necessarily have an underserved market?
CONNOR:
Right.
PAT:
And so you have pivoted the company. And what informed that decision?
CONNOR:
A lot of it was a marketing problem, I think we faced. So in your instance in talking about Wabash College, if we only had schools like Wabash or we carry Hope College or the bigger school, but a D2 one still in like Wayne State up in Detroit, there is no community really to tap into online. I mean, there are people on Twitter, like yourself, who are graduates of Wabash College, but there’s not a continual conversation around the Little Giants athletics.
PAT:
There’s not a podcast or a . . . Yeah, like you have with IU.
CONNOR:
Right.
PAT:
Right.
CONNOR:
So we’ve learned, while we love to do those, one, we’re going to spend probably about the same amount of effort marketing to Wabash to try to make it work as we would for IU. But Indiana University’s undergraduate size is 10X the size of Wabash.
PAT:
Sure.
CONNOR:
And then there’s also people who cheer for IU athletics who did not attend the university.
PAT:
And IU also has the, is it the largest alumni base? Or maybe it’s like top three?
CONNOR:
One of them. Yeah. It’s huge. So there’s a lot more there. Just when you’re starting out you can’t live off of simply the D2s and D3s. Additionally, in our case, we’ve led with some larger schools, there is an effect where people will add a school they think is cool. Like people buy Wabash now who become aware of the brand because they’ve bought larger schools. But they think it’s cool because Wally Wabash is a funny mascot.
PAT:
Right.
CONNOR:
Right. So I think for us it’s not just the small schools, it’s, we find ways with IU, for example. We did a whole campaign in the fall called the IU football shirt of the week. IU football traditionally, again, has not had the most luck. It continually trades spots with Northwestern for most losses in collegiate football history. So in that regard, it’s overlooked and especially for basketball with, we used to be good at that sport on the men’s side, once upon a time.
So there’s a lot of untold stories, even within one of the largest alumni bases in the entire world. And we were able to show logos and tell stories during that, that people still hadn’t heard about those underserved. So we had a shirt that was blue and it had an IU logo on it. Because for one year in 1958, Phil Dickins, the new coach, tried to reverse the team’s fortunes back in 1958 by wearing blue jerseys.
PAT:
Oh, really.
CONNOR:
Right.
PAT:
I didn’t know that.
CONNOR:
So there are stories still that are uncovered and untold that we get down to, for a university that is well-known across the country, both in athletics and academics. So you have to find the niche within each school, really, to tell the untold. And yeah, there’s still underserved markets even in really saturated schools. You just have to find the angle.
PAT:
Oh, very cool. Very cool. It’s really kind of telling that IU has one of the losingest programs in history, and we thought we could turn it around by changing the color of our jerseys. That seems like not the optimal place to start.
CONNOR:
My favorite, though, is that it was in 1958, like, back then, 60 years ago, they thought, “Hey, it’s time to really reverse the fortunes of this program.”
PAT:
They saw the writing on the wall.
CONNOR:
Right.
PAT:
Well, they are getting better. Which is good.
CONNOR:
Oh, it’s great. Those are one of the biggest things that we rode, I’m very thankful for that as a fan and just with Homefield. Because it’s one of the biggest things that helped grow our brand, as we became known as the Indiana football people for awhile.
PAT:
And the “nine win” Indiana shirts—
CONNOR:
Yeah, the 9Windiana. Yeah.
PAT:
The winningest season in 25 years at least.
CONNOR:
Since I’ve been alive. Yeah, that’s about right.
PAT:
And so when you launch a new school, I mean, you talked a little bit about finding the niche within each of these schools and figuring out what the untold story is. But when you launch a school, how do you know you’ve got product-market fit? How do you know you launched the right product at the right time, at the right place, with the right people, right? Those three or four things.
CONNOR:
Yeah, people, product, time, place. So sometimes it’s extremely obvious. I mean, it takes off right away. We put the 9Windiana shirt up, and it sells like hotcakes.
PAT:
And what does that mean, sell like . . . Take off right away, selling like hotcake.
CONNOR:
If you could put a metric on it, you could say, like, when we launch a shirt, we expect this many sales, or we traditionally see this many sales for this type of school. And then if we over-index by however many percent. But when you’re growing as a brand, I mean, it’s really tough to tell because it’s maybe just normal growth as a brand. Right? And that’s just how it works. But with us it’s more of a feeling, like, man, we released recently the Dayton Flyers’ three new t-shirts, and they were over half of our revenue for the day, the other day.
PAT:
Oh, wow.
CONNOR:
4,000-person school in Dayton, Ohio. So that’s how you know. Yeah, we’ve reached product-market fit with these specific t-shirts.
Sometimes it takes a minute. I do take it back and out of those four components. Like when we first launched Dayton as a school, it did fine, but it was also last March after they lost in the A-10 tournament, and didn’t make the tournament. So their season’s over, so it wasn’t selling like hotcakes. It was the wrong time, but time you can always wait out. We—
PAT:
Right. We had another season, and yep.
CONNOR:
So we still have the right product to the right people in the right place, because we knew there was that community. So for the most part, it becomes pretty obvious. It can be pretty obvious, I should say. And then if it doesn’t, then I think you have to go back and reevaluate the components, and maybe one of them’s just off. And you hope it’s always time, in our instance, because with our business it’s so cyclical, sports are cyclical. You have literal seasons that are marked, you have a school year. So yeah, for the most part, it’s pretty obvious unless if one of those components is off, and you hope it’s the one that is cyclical and not the one that like, man, we really botched this, and we shouldn’t have even launched this school.
PAT:
Right, right. We’ve got a bad product or not a great fan base, not the fan base we thought it was going to be.
CONNOR:
And there are some schools that we launched, I mean, we didn’t think of this framework when launching the brand initially. And we added our first few batches of schools because we just thought everybody wants this, which they do, in our experience. But now it’s, where do they want it? And so maybe the e-commerce space isn’t the best for all of these schools. I find it hard to believe that e-commerce is not a fit for anyone, because unless it’s like the guy the other day who asked if he could mail us a check for his product, most people are comfortable with shopping online.
PAT:
That’s a little rough.
CONNOR:
Yeah. I told him, “Sorry, pal.” But yeah. I mean, I think the way things are going, the place will be fine with e-commerce. It’s more, how we market to those people.
PAT:
And so you know you’ve got product-market fit if you see your sales over indexing, what you would expect from a similar school or what you have budget. Right? And that budgets based upon historicals and growth of your email list and things like that. Right?
CONNOR:
Right.
PAT:
And for Dayton, when you launched, you said, it went fine.
CONNOR:
Yes.
PAT:
And so I would suspect that even though you didn’t know you had a product-market fit there, enough of the other things besides time has to be good enough.
CONNOR:
Right.
PAT:
And it has to be kind of at a minimum bar, I guess, is what I’m thinking, in order for you to ultimately have that product-market fit when you put the time piece.
CONNOR:
Right. Exactly. And so for us, it was people within their Twitter community who are more gatekeepers saying, “This is a great product.” The people who understand what resonates with that fan base saying, “This is great.” They get it.
PAT:
Right.
CONNOR:
So that was an indicator for us that we had hit the people and product, and now time and place was to follow.
PAT:
Gotcha. Gotcha. And then, within each school you’ve got, I mean, you talked about the untold stories, but you’ve got different markets within each school too. Right? It’s not just alumni, but you’ve got some general fans who might like football or might like basketball or might like baseball. And so how does that inform your decision on which school to launch? Does it matter how many different teams the school has, or how rabid those fan bases are? Or do you really just need one overall fan base that has a lot of alumni, for instance?
CONNOR:
Yeah. Again, I think it’s a little bit of both. I would say it’s always helpful when there’s more than one sport, because then you’re not isolated to a season.
PAT:
So it helps smooth out that seasonality.
CONNOR:
But even if it is isolated to one sport, if that sport . . . I mean, Dayton’s men’s basketball, that sport is strong enough it’ll carry you. Ideally, though, I mean, we’ve had a great partnership with Mississippi State. They have rabid fans for baseball, women’s basketball ,and football, even though they’re not very good at football. Recently, they’ve had a couple good years. So, ideally, you’d love to have it be year-round, right? So it flattens out a little more, but I believe you really need . . . So much of what we do is tied to athletics. There are some schools that are larger student population that it doesn’t do as well, just because there’s not a strong athletics presence there. Really tried to figure out IU-PUI for a while. There’s also an identity problem where it’s like, are we IU? Are we IU-PUI? Right? And it’s tough.
PAT:
Yeah, that one’s a little weird. Yeah.
CONNOR:
I mean, there’s still 30,000, I believe, plus students. So yeah, I mean, I think ideally, you would love it to be year-round, but I think for us you just need one dedicated diehard sport at least.
PAT:
And so would you ever go into a school not because of the sports, but because of something else? Like Harvard is not known, they have sports right, but they’re known for their academics.
CONNOR:
Right.
PAT:
As well are most Ivy League schools.
CONNOR:
Right.
PAT:
So would you go into a school just because they have a big alumni base or a fervent alumni base and not necessarily because of the sports aspect?
CONNOR:
Yeah, definitely. There’s been other reasons we’ve added schools, or made a design. Like Radford, for example, a school in Virginia, they did make the tournament last year, which is why we initially added them. But beyond that, they have a crazy-looking mascot from when they initially launched. I think it was in the ’80s, they launched a mascot named Rowdy. And he looks like a version of Elmo that maybe isn’t suitable for children, but people love it. I mean, it’s one of our . . . You can tell when orders come in that people aren’t alums of the school because they’ll order three different types of schools. And they have no connection whatsoever. And so he, Rowdy, is always among that bunch. So sometimes we’ll add schools, like, we’re looking for the fall right now to have some schools. And there’s a few of them, they don’t really have a strong alumni base. They don’t really have crazy athletics, but—
PAT:
People are just buying the shirts because it’s a kitschy, fun, interesting product. Like you told me one a couple weeks ago, there’s a pickle or something like that?
CONNOR:
Oh yeah. Fighting Okra.
PAT:
Fighting Okra.
CONNOR:
Yeah.
PAT:
I knew it was a vegetable.
CONNOR:
Yeah. We get a lot of requests for that for fans of a specific podcast that they shut down. They love that one, they’ve been bothering for us for a while for that one, so I think we may do that.
PAT:
Gotcha.
CONNOR:
We’ll see, though.
PAT:
That’s funny. And so when you started Homefield, you were originally just making t-shirts, but now you’ve got hoodies. And so how do you decide which SKUs to add, and how?
CONNOR:
Yeah, we look certainly for low-hanging fruit. And so I think a lot of that’s just going to games. I’ll go to games and see what people wear. I go to tailgates at IU just as a fan myself.
PAT:
So it’s a little bit of just personal taste.
CONNOR:
Yeah, it’s personal taste, so T’s, fleece makes a lot of sense. That’s kind of the core product in the industry. The women’s market is really underserved still, with women-specific SKUs. And we started to roll those out. We want to make sure our quality is upheld, too. So when it comes to sourcing it’s, oh, that looks interesting, but it doesn’t hold up great in the wash. Or, the sizing is weird. Sizing is huge.
PAT:
And the cuts need to be right, too.
CONNOR:
Correct. Correct. There’s a lot that goes . . . And of course, before anything, making sure it’s ethically sourced, that it’s not destroying the environment. That people are getting paid a fair wage, slave labor is not used, which was a big, big issue, especially in the industry in the ’90s. So, yeah, there’s a lot that goes into that. But I think it honestly starts with reacting, and then you can also look to runways, and see within the Midwest, maybe that type of cut will not make it here for another five years. But I mean, you do keep an eye on fashion, even on the runways.
PAT:
Gotcha. Interesting. And so another aspect of your product is maybe a quick turnaround time.
CONNOR:
Yes.
PAT:
And so in this day of next-day delivery from Amazon, how big is timing of your product, too? How quickly does somebody really need a Fighting Okra mascot t-shirt?
CONNOR:
Amazon doesn’t make it difficult, for one. It raises everyone’s expectations. They think—
PAT:
For sure.
CONNOR:
They don’t understand that we are—
PAT:
That you’re not Amazon.
CONNOR:
That we have seven people right now on staff, and three to four of them are in the office per day fulfilling orders. A lot of what we get with smaller schools is a sentiment of, “I’ve waited my entire life for a decent sweatshirt to wear for my school. If it takes 48 hours to ship instead of 24, it’s not the end of the world.”
PAT:
Right.
CONNOR:
However, I think on the general level, people’s expectations, I mean, I won’t order anything off Amazon if it’s not Prime. And I run an e-commerce brand and I realize, oh man, that doesn’t bode well for me, because I have probably the most grace of that, just knowing what goes into fulfillment. I do think it helps when people have a connection with us as a brand, which is something we’ve really fostered is that people are more understanding. But still, as we grow, the hope, when there’s hundreds of thousands of customers one day, the hope is that it gets to that level. We can’t have a personal connection with every single one. So, yeah, the demands are tough, and that’s something that we constantly work to cut down so we have those repeat purchases.
PAT:
And so with the more niche schools, or if there’s a really underserved market, having them wait a few days isn’t that big of a deal because they’ve been waiting for a while, what’s a few more days? What about a bigger brand like IU, or maybe some of the other ones you want to go after like Ohio State or Alabama? If you’re able to get those licenses, how big of a deal is turnaround time for those?
CONNOR:
Yeah. I mean, it’s really on a person-by-person basis, but we do get . . . It’s a big deal, frankly. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s just, people have expectations, and you have to meet them, and especially if they’re paying a premium price for a premium product, they’re expecting shipping to match that.
PAT:
And they can get some of those products elsewhere, too, right? Where they may have quicker turnaround time.
CONNOR:
We would say, not our designs. Right? I mean, there are people who can make . . . I mean, the product that feels the way that we do, if you care about the Homefield brand itself you obviously can’t get it anywhere else. Which is what we’ve tried to build. It’s not just, “I want a nice IU t-shirt.” It’s now, “I want a nice Homefield IU t-shirt.” And our experience, I mean, opening the package, it’s different than anywhere else. So we’d like to say you can’t get it anywhere else, but of course you can find a nice Indiana . . . And then especially schools we don’t have, like Michigan, Ohio State, Alabama, you can get a nice something from a Fanatics or Amazon, get there in 48 hours. But ultimately, that’s why we have to work on differentiation while at the same time figuring out how we can continue to cut down on shipping times.
PAT:
All right, last question of the day, what’s the single biggest thing folks can do to get better product-market fit?
CONNOR:
I think it’s twofold. Being brutally honest to yourself, which is easier for some folks, to be more self-aware and take a look and remove any bias. So looking at what you do, and again, I broke it. . . . For me, I read a lot about it when the brand was falling apart. And for me, what really resonated was people, product, place, and time. Right? So evaluating those four categories and being brutally honest. And then asking for feedback from others. I asked feedback from you on this last summer, I asked feedback from plenty of other people I trusted and respected. And so just having a critical eye yourself, but then the things you’re not going to see, your blind spots, you have to have others speak into that.
And for me the framework was those four components. Other people might view it differently. But yeah, being self-critical and having others speak into those four areas, that’s what I would recommend.
PAT:
And so really self-awareness is going to help you the most, so you can figure out on a day-to-day basis, here’s the small adjustments I need to make. But to your point, if you have a blind spot, you can’t be self-aware of that, because that’s the major blind spots, right?
CONNOR:
Yep.
PAT:
You can’t, you’re blind to them. Right? So having good mentors is helpful, but being open to having mentors and open to that criticism, knowing that that criticism is there to help you and not tear you down.
CONNOR:
Yeah. I mean, there was a two-month period where with one person I met with, every conversation was such a drag. And I dreaded answering this person’s phone calls. And dreaded answering their emails, or seeing their name pop up on my phone, because I knew it was going to not be fun for me.
PAT:
Sure. Yeah.
CONNOR:
But it was really helpful. And some of the insights from those conversations . . . and I knew that person cared. And I asked them to speak in that way. So in that regard, some of the things that came out of those phone calls at our lowest points was what really helped us reshape what we do now. And what we have been successful in. And we just had our, this is our second, we’re an 18-month-old brand so we—
PAT:
So you’re in your second—
CONNOR:
Second year. And our February, I was just telling you beforehand, was six and a half times what last February was. Not that last February was any great thing, but we were doing things completely differently than we did—
PAT:
But that’s what we want to see. We want to see that growth and—
CONNOR:
Right.
PAT:
You can talk about holidays where you hit your holiday budget halfway through. Right?
CONNOR:
Right.
PAT:
I mean, just really insane insane, impressive growth.
CONNOR:
Thank you. And it’s been those tough conversations and the honest reflection that has led to this point, though. Very rarely, I think, do you launch something and everything’s exactly as you planned. You know? I don’t think that actually ever happens.
PAT:
Never happens. Customers always do something slightly different than you thought they would.
CONNOR:
Yeah. And it’s—
PAT:
Or hugely different.
CONNOR:
And us making a dumb shirt that says “9Windiana” sparked something that, I mean, we were selling t-shirts in the stadium in Jacksonville, Florida, because we became known as the Indiana football people.
PAT:
And we almost got nine wins. We were so close.
CONNOR:
Yeah. Oh my goodness. We were so desperate. . . . Did I tell you that stat? Indiana, for those of you who listen who weren’t rabid Indiana football fans—
PAT:
Which is probably most of you.
CONNOR:
We were up 13 with four minutes and 51 seconds to go, I think. And ended up losing in just perfect, perfect fashion.
PAT:
And we’ve lost our last three bowl games by a total of one touchdown.
CONNOR:
Yeah. Oh yeah.
PAT:
I mean, it’s been brutal to be a fan.
CONNOR:
It’s been brutal. Yeah. But at that point we were down 13. I saw a stat that ESPN tweeted out right afterward, and it’s just salt in the wound. I think it was something, 500 football games had been played that year where a team was up 13 with that amount of time left and all of them had won the football game, except Indiana.
PAT:
Oh, geez. I hadn’t heard that. I was watching, it was a brutal game, but I hadn’t heard that stat.
CONNOR:
It was quite brutal.
PAT:
All right. Well, I wish there was a different note we could end on!
CONNOR:
No, it’s perfect.
PAT:
Our podcasts are normally 30 minutes, we’re at about the 40-minute mark. So we’ll go ahead and end it there today. Connor, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it.
CONNOR:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
PAT:
If folks want to find you online, what’s the best way for them to do that?
CONNOR:
Yes. You can find our products at Homefieldapparel.com. And then I will be most certainly firing off dumb collegiate sports-related tweets @HomefieldApparl. But there is no E before the L, so it’s character limits. So really apparl. A-P-P-A-R-L.
PAT:
Or maybe just Google Homefield Apparel, Twitter, and—
CONNOR:
Yeah, it’ll pop up. Easy enough. Yep. Exactly.
PAT:
All right, thanks again, appreciate it.
CONNOR:
Yeah. Thanks, Pat.
Like a Glove is a production of The Mill, a coworking and business incubator space in Bloomington, Indiana. Our mission is to launch and accelerate high-potential companies. And our vision is to become the center of coworking and entrepreneurship in Indiana. You can learn more about the mill at dimensionmill.org. Thanks for listening, and be sure to check back every other Monday for new episodes.